arXiv Machine Learning

Text Capability Loss in Vision-Language Adaptation: An Attention-Sink Diagnosis

arXiv AI
Jun 2

VLM4VLA: Revisiting Vision-Language-Models in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2601. 03309v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate pretrained large Vision-Language Models (VLM) into their policy backbone, are gaining significant attention for their promising generalization capabilities.

By Jianke Zhang, Xiaoyu Chen, Qiuyue Wang, Mingsheng Li, Yanjiang Guo, Yucheng Hu, Jiajun Zhang, Shuai Bai, Junyang Lin, Jianyu Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 25

What Transfers from Text to Vision? Capability Scaling Laws and Transfer Dynamics for VLMs

The paper introduces the Capability-Driven Multimodal Scaling Law, a cross-family framework that predicts vision-language model (VLM) benchmark accuracy from a low-dimensional textual capability score extracted via PCA. By training over 150 VLMs on 34 large language models across seven families, the authors demonstrate that the law accurately extrapolates transfer rates from 8B to 72B‑parameter backbones, predicts full training trajectories, and generalizes to unseen model families. The study also reveals actionable insights, such as certain textual benchmarks negatively correlating with multimodal performance and base LLMs outperforming instruction-tuned counterparts as VLM backbones due to higher absorption rates.

By Ziran Li, Qiang Wang, Zhengyu Chen, Shanglin Lei, Borun Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Retrieval Heads Meet Vision: Uncovering How VLMs Locate and Extract Visual Information

The paper introduces Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), a small fraction of attention heads in vision‑language models that are causally responsible for grounding text descriptions to image regions. By recasting head‑scoring methods and evaluating across eleven VLMs and five benchmarks, the authors show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect. VRHs generalize across various visual reference tasks, preserve output format while corrupting localization, and transfer causally across models sharing an LLM backbone.

By Chanho Park, Daehyeon Choi, Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Retrieval Heads Meet Vision: Uncovering How VLMs Locate and Extract Visual Information

The paper demonstrates that vision‑language models (VLMs) possess a small set of attention heads, called Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), that are causally responsible for linking text prompts to specific image regions. By adapting head‑scoring techniques from language models, the authors identify VRHs as the heads whose attention from output prediction tokens, summed over the ground‑truth referent region, most reliably indicates causal grounding. Experiments across eleven VLMs and five referring‑expression benchmarks show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect, and that VRHs generalize across diverse visual tasks and transfer across models sharing an LLM backbone.